Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 22 quotes that I liked and saved while reading A Little Life book by Hanya Yanagihara. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
A Little Life Quotes
- We don’t get the families we deserve.
- New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common.
- What was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain.
- Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.
- Friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information.
- You see, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry – they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.
- The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us – the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics – and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal.
- Regular math, or applied math, is what I suppose you could call practical math. It’s used to solve problems, to provide solutions, whether it’s in the realm of economics, or engineering, or accounting, or what have you. But pure math doesn’t exist to provide immediate, or necessarily obvious, practical applications. It’s purely an expression of form, if you will – the only thing it proves is the almost infinite elasticity of mathematics itself, within the accepted set of assumptions by which we define it, of course.
- Having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless.
- Law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don’t often do well in law school (unless they are bad novelists, poets, and artists), but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians, and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.
- It’s not accidental that law is called a trade, and like all trades, what it demands most is a capacious memory. What it demands next – again, like many trades – is the ability to see the problem before you … and then, just as immediately, the rat’s tail of problems that might follow.
- The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.
- Making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities.
- It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick.
- A society cannot run as it should unless people with excellent legal minds make it their business to make it run.
- Success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing – success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas.
- People who don’t love math always accuse mathematicians of trying to make math complicated. But anyone who does love math knows it’s really the opposite: math rewards simplicity, and mathematicians value it above all else.
- We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap – if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.
- The point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all – and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.
- If you love home – and even if you don’t – there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back. That week, even the things that would irritate you – the alarm waahing from some car at three in the morning; the pigeons who come to clutter and cluck on the windowsill behind your bed when you’re trying to sleep in – seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it.
- Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person – sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty – and you get to pick three of those things. Three – that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It’s only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things.
- Life is so sad. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.